Juliet Clutton-Brock had a research post at the Natural History Museum in London, where she ran the osteology room.
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/The Independent

Juliet Clutton-Brock, who has died aged 82, was a pioneer in the relatively new field of archaeozoology – the study of animal remains from archaeological sites – which aims to shed light on the relationships between people and animals in the distant past. The focus is particularly upon the where, when, how and why of the transformation of wild animals, hunted mainly for food, skins and fur, into tame, domesticated creatures, to be slaughtered as sources of meat and leather, or exploited when alive to provide milk and wool, carry loads, pull ploughs and be ridden, and as human companions.

Juliet’s numerous books outlined the development of these relationships, encompassing not only her own seminal researches, but also drawing together information from a wide variety of sources and incorporating the results of radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis as they became available. They included Domesticated Animals from Early Times (1981), Horse Power: A History of the Horse and Donkey in Human Societies (1992), Two Hundred Years of British Farm Livestock (1989, in collaboration with Stephen Hall), and the Eyewitness Guides: Dog (1991), Cat (1991), Horse (1992) and Mammals (2002). She had a particular interest in dogs and was the author of at least 20 scientific papers on them and co-author of an 82-page paper, A Review of the Family Canidae, published by the Natural History Museum.

Juliet was born in London, the daughter of Shelagh Archer and Alan Clutton-Brock, sometime art critic of the Times and Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge University. The family lived for a while in a rather grand Georgian house high above the Thames on the edge of Blackheath, “among beautiful objects and chaos overlaid with dust and cobwebs”. Shelagh died in a road accident in 1936, and Juliet and her brother, Francis, were sent to live with an aunt in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Her lifelong interest in animals, both wild and domestic, stemmed from her time in Africa, where her happiness was marred only by Francis’s death from polio. She wrote: “The garden was a paradise of freedom with infinite resources for childhood adventure – I was not supposed to go out of sight of the house but I always did. In the garden, there were tarantulas, which fascinated me, and snakes that I was terrified of.”

In 1945 she returned from the heat and light of Africa to postwar Britain, to an icy boarding school, Runton Hill in Norfolk, where she developed an interest in the fossil-bearing strata exposed along the nearby sea cliffs. In 1953 she enrolled on a course in archaeological technique at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, where she caught the eye of the professor of environmental archaeology, Frederick Zeuner, who persuaded her to study for a degree in zoology at Chelsea College of Science and Technology.

After obtaining a first, Juliet returned to the Institute of Archaeology and completed, under Zeuner, a PhD on animal remains from some archaeological excavations in India and the Middle East. She also attended lectures there given by the now almost legendary archaeologists Gordon Childe, Max Mallowan and Kathleen Kenyon. This was the beginning of her career in archaeozoology, which under Zeuner’s guidance was being established as a new discipline. It involves the identification of often fragmentary bones and teeth, which requires not only a wide knowledge of comparative osteology, but also an appreciation of the significance of these remains to the history of the people who accumulated them.

During college holidays Juliet returned to live in Chastleton House, a fine Jacobean manor in the Cotswolds that her father had inherited from a cousin in 1955. The house had been in the family, virtually unchanged, since its construction, or, as family tradition had it, “built in 1603 and never dusted since”. It was sold to the National Trust in 1991 by Alan’s second wife, Barbara.

In 1958 Juliet married Peter Jewell, a physiologist and agricultural scientist, who shared her interest in archaeozoology. Peter, Juliet and their three daughters, Sarah, Rebecca and Topsy, moved to Africa in 1966 when he was appointed professor of biological sciences at the University of Nigeria; escaping across the river Niger during the Biafran war the following year, they lost most of their belongings, including Juliet’s data cards on the animal remains from the important prehistoric site of Jericho, a loss that did not prevent her publishing three seminal papers on the results after their return to London.

In 1969, after a few years of part-time employment at the Natural History Museum, Juliet landed a research post there, running the osteology room – a warren of mounted animal skeletons and assorted cupboards of bones. She received and helped visiting researchers from all over the world with her vast knowledge of mammalian osteology, zoological nomenclature and animal behaviour, while carrying on with her own analysis of material from archaeological sites in Britain, Switzerland, the Middle East and India, which resulted in the production of more than 100 scientific papers.

Juliet was also concerned with domestic animals nearer home, and she and Peter were founder members in 1973 of the still thriving Rare Breeds Survival Trust.

When the International Council for Archaeozoology was consolidated in 1976 at a conference in Nice, Juliet was chosen to be a member of the executive committee. The council organises international conferences every four years in various parts of the world – Juliet and I organised the fourth, at the Institute of Archaeology, in 1982; many of the resulting conference papers, published in four volumes in 1983 and 1984, are still widely cited. In 1988 Juliet edited The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, consisting of papers given at the World Archaeological Congress in Southampton in 1986.

The development of radiocarbon dating and the discovery of DNA had a seismic effect upon archaeology. Juliet arranged for many critical individual animal bones and skulls to be dated and, despite having been trained as an osteologist, using anatomical differences and similarities of bones and teeth to establish the relationship and ancestry of various animal species, she eagerly embraced the ever-evolving techniques of the application of DNA to archaeozoology. Provided samples prove suitable for extraction, the analysis of DNA allows genetic relationships to be established not only between modern animals of different taxa, but also between them and animals represented only by fossil or sub-fossil bone.

When she left the Natural History Museum in 1993, Juliet was honoured by colleagues with a festschrift entitled Skeletons in Her Cupboard. The following year she was appointed one of the editors of the Journal of Zoology and, from 1999 to 2006, its managing editor; always concerned about animal welfare, she liaised closely with the ethics committee of the Zoological Society to ensure that all experimental research published in the journal complied with the highest standards and best practice in animal care.

Active and involved to the end, she went on to write more than 25 further scientific papers, as well as reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, and to become an associate editor of the Archives of Natural History. Juliet’s last book, Animals as Domesticates: A World View Through History, was published in 2012.

Peter died in 1998. Juliet is survived by her daughters and nine grandchildren.

• Juliet Clutton-Brock, archaeozoologist, born 16 September 1933; died 21 September 2015